September 26, 2017

Apropos of nothing, what if Trump did not run in 2016? Lots more independents would have voted in the primaries for Bernie, and so would have the Democrats who crossed over for Trump. It would have been Bernie vs. Jeb (or whatever other generic Republican) in the general, and Bernie would have won, whether it turned out to be an improvement over Obama's numbers or not.

We're probably going to hear something like this question coming from our sympathizers on the Bernie side, at some point during the first Trump term. "See how ineffectual he is -- why didn't you guys just vote for Bernie in the primaries? He's anti-Establishment, populist, not psychotic about wars, but he actually had political experience!"

The Bernie people need to take a long hard look at how massive and unrelenting the sabotage of the Trump agenda has been, before he even took office. It doesn't matter if you win an election -- that's just the beginning of the war, not the end.

The political and economic Establishment is trying to plunge America into World War III against nuclear Russia, just to get Trump out of office. Do the Bernie people really think there would be any different of a response if the White House were occupied by some other "crazy" guy with "crazy" ideas about lowering the elites and elevating the people?

Like, just because Bernie won an election, the big Wall Street banks are just going to roll over and accept the 2% tax on financial transactions to pay for social democratic programs? Just because he won an election, the drug and healthcare monopolies are going to accept dramatic losses when the government saves a fortune by going onto single-payer ("bulk discount healthcare")? Just because he won an election, the vast majority of Democrats in the Senate and House are going to be charging full steam ahead on issues that they were eviscerating Bernie for during the primaries?

Even Obama got his arm twisted into a troop surge in Afghanistan of 100,000 -- and the Pentagon is not a member of the Democrat coalition that won the election. But when a societal faction is that powerful, they are going to get at least something no matter which party is in the White House. Likewise Wall Street is going to get something from the Trump administration, even though the banks are not part of the GOP coalition that won the election.

So the social democrats should not be so assured that, if Trump had not run, it wouldn't have been Bernie making that primetime address in April about the dire need to bomb the Damascus dictator.

Just as Trump is being given some lee-way on the trade deal front -- although how much is still very much up in the air -- Bernie would be given some lee-way on negotiating drug prices or something healthcare related.

And the diehard Bernie bros and babes would be grateful that at least something was changing for the better somewhere in politics, but they would largely be struck by as much cognitive dissonance as the Trump supporters have been.

They would probably split into separate camps with their own takes on why the Bernie revolution was or was not being fulfilled -- the Panglossian cheerleaders for whom any news is awesome news, the psychologically oriented who would blame Bernie's motives (sell-out) or his knowledge (clueless), and the institutionally minded who would point to how little political capital he has, and how powerful the various factions are that he'd be taking on (Pentagon, Wall Street, etc.).

Of course, the issues being pursued would be different -- he'd be getting cucked more by Wall Street than by the Pentagon. And the personnel would reflect that -- his authoritarian Chief of Staff would be sent from Goldman Sachs rather than the Marines.

And it is worth wondering whether the overall mix of issues being pursued would be better or worse than the situation with Trump in office. The Pentagon seizing control of the government leads to a military bubble, whose fat-tailed consequences can go all the way up to nuclear war in magnitude. Wall Street seizing control would lead to a financial bubble, whose fat-tailed effects could cripple the economy here and around the world.

I think most Americans would prefer a financial over a military bubble, as the lesser of two evils -- that's why they're more inclined toward Democrats for President in the period where the GOP has become the warmonger party. Wars are far worse than recessions, and nuclear war would be worse than even a severe depression.

At any rate, the Bernie people should put themselves in our shoes and think more rationally about how collective power dynamics work at an institutional level, rather than focus on individual personalities like Bernie and Trump.

Supposedly they're better at thinking that way than the Right, but I've seen little self-reflection from them (at least that they'll admit) that Bernie would witness his anti-Establishment appointees getting purged from the government just like Trump has, and that Wall Street would be running things far far more than they'd thought possible in a populist presidency.

Just like the Trump movement, the Bernie movement did not build any organizations during the campaign, they would continue to be unorganized after their hero's inauguration, and they would therefore have little means of exerting influence over what the government was doing. They were looking up to Bernie almost like a savior, in the same way many Trump supporters did to their candidate. It was more of a hail-Mary pass than an earnest beginning of a long war.

So what would they have done when they wiped their eyes in disbelief on election night, and found out that the revolution had won at the ballot box? Probably what the Trump voters did -- assume that the worst was over, rest assured, breathe a deep sigh of relief, and let Bernie's appointees figure everything out and carry out their leader's agenda.

Then less than three months into the revolutionary White House, President Sanders goes on live TV to defend bailing out another Wall Street bank, after describing how "flexible" he has to be on important issues.

If they think their side of the populist awakening is immune to the counter-revolutionary assault that has been waged against the Trump movement, they are only fooling themselves.

Our enemies are fighting us collectively and are scratching each other's backs, so we need to organize and act collectively, and vote in sympathetic politicians who will freely give political capital to the populist President rather than withhold it and stymie his agenda.

And just as our enemies coordinate in a bipartisan or nonpartisan way, we too need to coordinate with the other side of the populist uprising. If they have the Uni-party, then we must have the Uni-movement.

September 25, 2017

The up-one-month, down-one-month cycle is going to take us into a low point coming up. See the last report from early July, during a relative high point.

After an ebb in the witch hunt, everyone piling onto CNN, the speech in Warsaw, and the meeting with Putin, who could have foreseen what a disaster was coming up in the second half of July and into August?

The public feuding with Sessions, the Alt-Right looking retarded and killing someone at Charlottesville, the purge by the Pentagon junta of the fellow travelers of Mike Flynn, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, and culminating in the Afghanistan troop surge.

I saw all of that coming -- not the specifics, of course, but the fact that after the high we were going to go into a low again, right on the bi-monthly schedule. It's been happening since the beginning of 2016 at least, and I've been covering it with each turning of the wheel.

The most recent peak after the terrible month of August was nothing big, but more of a lull in the hate and witch hunt coming from the globalist elites, and even building some goodwill during the hurricane response, as well as cutting bipartisan deals with Chuck & Nancy.

The current downturn has already begun, it just doesn't feel that bad because it hasn't hit a low point yet.

At first Trump supporters were excited to hear the end of DACA, but then it emerged that Trump simply wanted it codified into law rather than handed down from executive branch over-reach. Then there's the tireless campaigning for Mitch McConnell's stooge in the Alabama special election, which is likely to blow up on Tuesday.

Legislatively, the GOP healthcare charade is going to piss everybody off all over again when it fails sometime soon. The tax reform plans have been revealed to be typical Republican tax cuts for the rich, which neither Trump nor any other populist has had any input into, but which Trump will be pressed into the service of campaigning for just like with the ridiculous healthcare / Afghanistan / "Strange doesn't even know McConnell" bullshit that the Establishment still thinks we're too stupid to notice so long as Trump is its public face.

Left-wing activist judges are poised to strike down the third iteration of the travel ban.

Who knows how this NFL culture war stuff is going to go -- hopefully no retards from the Alt-Right go mowing people down at a football game.

I'd like to end by saying, Let's hope the coming downturn is relatively quick and painless so we can get back to Trump trashing McConnell and other good things. But the nadir is going to hit during October -- famous for its surprises. We're just two weeks away from the date when the Access Hollywood tape blew up. Time to be extra vigilant.

September 23, 2017

First, some sabotage that flew under the radar of the Trump movement at the time: in April, DHS suspended Trump's executive order to come up with a regular report on how bad the sanctuary cities are behaving.

That article is from the LA Times, but all the mainstream media reported on it. The Trump movement did not notice it because it came just days after the Syria strike which signaled a return to regime change, and created confusion about who was really running the Trump administration's foreign policy (turns out: Deep State). We were preoccupied with more pressing matters.

That executive order came from the pre-coup phase of the administration (Jan 25), and was intended to "name and shame" sanctuary cities by providing details about how the local police departments that refused to cooperate with ICE had led to this, that, and the other horrible crime, or had let some despicable criminal off the hook.

It was Trump's attempt to use the bully pulpit to whip up popular anger against sanctuary cities, to which the politicians would have to acquiesce at least a little bit, or else face the angry mob.

Pentagon junta member General Kelly was in charge of DHS at the time, and killed that executive order less than two weeks after its implementation in late March. The excuse is that some of the data was inaccurate -- well then, I guess we can't just write reports with accurate data, we have to terminate the program altogether. (It is still "suspended," more than five months after first getting the axe, so it's as good as dead.)

The lesson: the Pentagon is a globalist organization that sees its job as managing a multinational empire, not defending the core nation, when those two goals necessarily conflict. They care more about not-shaming radical Islam than they do about shaming the crimes that sanctuary cities have allowed to happen against Americans by foreigners.

Previous updates have pointed out that there has been no data released to support the claims by ICE that, while deportations have been lower than under Obama, they have shifted to interior deportations rather than meaningless "deportations" that turn people back at the border.

You'd think that an administration -- and a President -- intent on proving that it's fulfilling the campaign promises to crack down on illegal immigration, would be releasing hard numbers. Something Trump could brag about, like he does with stats on illegal border crossings.

But ICE has been releasing even less data than it was under Obama, including what eventually happens to people who are the subject of a detainer. Do they actually get deported, or not? Neither the open border nor the build-the-wall side will know.

The excuse is that in the lame duck period, Obama changed the rules about what will be released through FOIA requests -- but it's not like Trump hasn't been President for eight months. Plenty of time to roll back a single regulation from the very end of Obama's term.

Clearly the globalists running DHS do not want the information getting out there, because it will show that the ramp-up in detainers being issued has not resulted in more illegals getting deported. And that there has not been a massive shift toward deportations from the interior vs. at the border. They would brag about that data, if it existed, not hide it and refuse to release it.

Illegal border crossings have doubled since April, so now they're only down 25% from last year, instead of 70-some percent in the first months of the administration. The initial "Trump spook" effect has worn off, and pretty soon those levels will be back to what they were under Obama.

Would-be illegal immigrants have figured out that the government writ large is still not enforcing immigration laws, despite the hardliner President ordering them to. Foreigners see a weak system here and take advantage of it.

At the rally supporting Establishment candidate Luther Strange (the first Trump rally I did not watch), the President revealed that the non-wall options are the only ones in the running for the "build the wall" contest among contractors.

I warned loudly about these non-wall bids months ago -- if the government is so intent on building a wall, why are there two separate tracks of bids, with one group being walls and the other group not being walls?

A lot of Trump supporters who didn't read past the headline, or follow up on exciting stories, only heard about the recent announcement of the four prototypes chosen from the wall track of bids. They didn't read the stories from the week or so after, announcing that four prototypes were also chosen from the non-wall track.

At this late date, how can these non-wall bids even still be in the running?

And yet, Trump tried to soften the blow during the rally by saying that the wall needs to be see-through. How about we "just ask Israel" if border walls need to be see-through? Or have a look at the Great Wall of China? Cameras and watchtowers work just fine.

This was not an off-the-cuff remark, as he said the same thing during Air Force One remarks on Sep 12, with the same risible rationalization about "what if Mexican cartels launch heavy bags of drugs over the wall and the patrol agents don't see it coming and they get hit on the head?"

We can take these remarks to mean that Trump has been informed by the Establishment that there will be no Wall on the southern border, but only some kind of fence, easy enough to slip bodies and contraband through, easy enough to cut a big hole through, etc. Just something empty, meaningless, and symbolic so that he can say he "built a wall".

Does the Establishment really think that the legions of rabid Trump supporters are going to forget Trump's repeated visual imagery from the campaign -- "precast concrete plank" that would tower 30, 40, 50 feet high, so high that once you get up there, you're not coming down easily?

I guess we'll see. Obviously the partisan Republicans will go with just about anything that any Republican President does. But the actual Trump supporters who were there from the very beginning in summer 2015? The iffy and alienated white working class from the Rust Belt? I don't see them cheering for Jeb Bush policies just because they're being sold by the persona of Donald Trump.

It's time to start framing the non-wall as a sabotage of the President and his voters by the Establishment, Deep State, etc., to get them angry enough to demand and even protest for a real wall. Rationalizing some ridiculous fence as the Platonic ideal of a border wall will only result in the cheerleader squad getting dunked on endlessly by the worst liberal shills.

We shouldn't make their jobs easy, and we shouldn't betray the American voters just to save face.

P.S. -- to lighten the mood, have a dark laugh at the roll call votes for the 1986 amnesty. House votes and Senate votes.

Republican President signed it.

Republican-controlled Senate passed it, with R's more in favor than D's. Although majorities of both parties were in favor, 20% of R's voted against, but 40% of D's voted against. Democrat Senators voting against amnesty: Gary Hart, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Bill Bradley.

Dem-controlled House passed it, with D's now more in favor than R's (partisanship). Still, some notable exceptions: Harry Reid voted against amnesty, and so did John Kasich in perhaps his only good vote ever.

If the Dems can re-orient back toward the working class -- a very big if -- I trust them to build a real wall before Republicans would. The GOP is simply too controlled by the Chamber of Commerce and the large farm owners who insist on feudalism as their business model. If Americans won't become serfs, then the immigration system must have open borders and/or unchecked guest worker levels.

Foreign labor flooding in means the death of unions, and with them the evaporation of millions of reliable Democrat voters -- who will not be replaced by reliable immigrant voters, since immigrants don't vote, Hispanics don't vote, and Hispanic immigrants really don't vote.

First the Republicans failed to learn that lesson -- they alienated far more Americans than they gained by pushing amnesty for illegal Hispanics. Now it may be the Democrats' turn -- they will destroy more of their own rock-solid voters than they will bring in through illegal Hispanics (who don't vote).

September 15, 2017

No sane person will claim that Trump got a good deal by promising amnesty for the DACA people, and perhaps more via their families who can and will be brought in, without getting a single concession from Democrat leaders on the issue of immigration -- deporting millions of non-DACA illegals, building the wall, lowering legal immigration, harsh penalties against employers hiring illegals, or de-funding sanctuary cities (Sessions proposes to only take away one-half of 1%).

Obviously, if that's the extent of the deal, then Trump got schlonged big-league.

However, most commentary has not discussed the big news that the other, opening topic at the dinner with Chuck and Nancy -- and excluding Ryan and McConnell -- was trade and China policy. Economic nationalist Commerce Secretary Ross was sitting in on the talk, albeit with Wall Street chaperon Globalist Gary Cohn.

And unlike their blanket dismissal of helping the Republican-controlled White House cut taxes for the rich ("tax reform"), the Democrat leaders did not flat out reject whatever Trump proposed they help him with regarding trade and re-industrialization.

Why would they? Their party has a far better record than the GOP, who seek a return to a pre-industrial agricultural economy where the people are peasants and servants. Schumer has voted against most of the anti-factory / pro-mega-farm trade deals, and Pelosi may have voted against some of them too. On the big one, NAFTA, Schumer voted against, but Pelosi voted in favor. Majorities of Democrats in both houses at the time voted against.

Bringing back manufacturing would mean millions of new voters for Congressional Democrats -- union members -- and in crucial states that cost them the presidential election, namely the Rust Belt.

Giving amnesty to the DACA people was already in the works, since the entire trend has been towards weaker immigration control than under Obama, reflecting both the Obama holdovers as well as the Bushie originals and the boarding party Bushies who now control the government.

The only question was, would Trump get anything in exchange? The Republicans sabotaged every move he made toward "America first", from foreign policy to immigration to trade. OK, no deals to be made there -- how about trying to get something good from the Democrats, who are in a weaker bargaining position than the Republicans?

Trump himself is in the weakest negotiating position any President has ever been in, since he does not have any history in politics -- no connections, no built up goodwill, no favors owed, no trust from the other politicians. Nor does he hail from one of the elite power factions that control society, like the military or the banks, who are the only groups outside the government itself that the politicians would take orders from.

Nobody in government faces consequences from not carrying out his orders, so they are free to either ignore him or outright sabotage him. And that's exactly what we've seen so far.

Since Trump is in no position to dictate terms, he will have to give more at the negotiating table -- being the one who invites the other party, asking them what they're willing to do rather than repeatedly threatening to walk, and making larger and longer-lasting up-front concessions.

Still, he wouldn't be dealing with them if he wasn't getting anything at all -- and he knows that more phony "border security" isn't going to accomplish anything on immigration. But if he gets their help on trade, where the GOP is resolutely opposed, that could at least amount to something.

With no effective authority inside Washington, and therefore having to surrender on the nationalist front, at least for now, Trump faces the choice of which wing of the victorious open borders army to sign a peace treaty with. It's either "amnesty in exchange for more wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan," or "amnesty in exchange for a potential trade war against China or Mexico".

It is the opposite of 4-D chess -- it's called trying to make the best of a bad situation, where you have no power and are at the mercy of two groups who hate your guts, but who you may be able to play off against each other to receive relatively less harmful treatment.

The junta controlling the White House has been sent by the Pentagon, not Wall Street. At least the Democrat leaders do not represent the faction that has held Trump hostage since April. He can work with them more freely, in a quid pro quo fashion, whereas his own party's factions have escalated a military takeover almost since he took office.

We still don't know whether anything concrete was agreed to on trade, let alone if the Democrats would actually honor their word after wringing amnesty for the DACA people, and then some, out of the immigration hardliner President.

But it sure as hell beats the alternative of trying to get anything good from the Republican side of the aisle in the inevitable amnesty of the DACA group.

September 8, 2017

Now that the DACA people are going to be amnestied, the next move by globalists will be to broaden it to other groups who are slightly lower on the sympathy scale, potentially including all 20 million illegals by the final round.

Immigration hardliners argue that mass amnesty is suicide for the GOP, since immigrants lean so heavily Democrat. They are trying to argue to Republican party leaders that, even if they despise their voters, they should at least back off of amnesty in order to ensure their own survival as a major party.

This is a naive argument, which explains why it is never listened to by the GOP. Most immigrants, legal or illegal, are heavily concentrated in safe states -- mostly deep blue ones like California and New York, but also deep red ones like Texas and Utah. Millions more newly legalized citizens with voting rights in California will be no big loss to the GOP there, as the party effectively no longer exists in that state.

What about turning red states like Texas into blue ones? That also will not happen, because most of these immigrants are Hispanic, and Hispanics do not vote, even when they are eligible. This covers blue state cases as well -- they will not get even further blue, as their Hispanic immigrants will not vote either.

The most recent year of good voting data is for the 2012 presidential election, as studied by the General Social Survey, the gold standard in social research (large national probability samples going back to the 1970s). Let's review the cold hard facts on voting participation. We will stick just to people who are even eligible to vote, assuming the best-case scenario for immigrant advocates who want them to be able to vote.

Among immigrants -- those residing outside the US at age 16 -- only 46% voted, vs. 71% of native citizens.

Within the Hispanic population, only 28% of immigrants voted, vs. 51% of native citizens.

Again, those are all considering people who are already eligible to vote.

The voting rates for all groups are lower in the West South Central region, which is basically Greater Texas. So the largest red state is in no danger of being flipped blue by low-voting Hispanics, immigrants, or Hispanic immigrants.

The only large state that could be affected is the swing state of Florida -- but then Florida has always been a swing state, back when it was mostly white, and right up through 2016 with its heavy Hispanic and immigrant population. So the GOP may reason that it has little to lose there if there are more immigrants.

An earlier post showed that large non-citizen populations do not affect how a state votes, but rather how much of a force multiplier it has. The number of Congressmen sent to the House is determined by resident population, not citizen population, so that states with lots of immigrants get more Representatives in Congress than they should. That is reflected in their weight within the Electoral College when it comes time to choosing a President as well.

But the GOP has already given up trying to be a national party that can field viable candidates for President. They lucked into the presidency in 2000 when the full Florida recount showed that Gore won among voters. They could have legitimately won in 2004, although who can say how much of that was due to the incumbency effect that resulted from the botched election of 2000. But maybe W. Bush could have been the Republican Jimmy Carter and won by a hair, serving only one despised term during an otherwise unbroken string of victories for the other party.

Of course Trump did better than W. Bush could have ever dreamed of, but he ran against the GOP, and the GOP did everything it could to stop him, and continues to subvert him well after he's taken office in the White House. So they still have no pretensions of being a national party to contest the presidency.

And although making Congressional representation reflect citizens only, rather than any old residents, could give Republicans better numbers in Congress, it also might not. The main shift would be fewer reps from the Sun Belt, with its enormous immigrant populations, and more reps back to the Rust Belt, where hardly any residents are immigrants.

In some Rust Belt areas like Ohio and Indiana, that would give more Republicans to Congress. But it would also mean more reps from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. Maybe those new districts would go to Trump-style Republicans -- but that's a nightmare for the GOP leadership. Otherwise they would go to Democrats. Almost certainly not would they become new corporate-friendly warmonger Republicans that the leadership desires.

So the GOP can rationally argue there is little downside to its electoral prospects from giving amnesty to all illegals and even throwing the borders wide open. At least up until the point where immigrants do begin to overwhelm the safe red states in voting numbers (different from resident numbers, since immigrants don't vote).

What about the upside? Well, the GOP is all about cutting labor costs to employers to boost corporate profits. They represent various specific sectors like the Pentagon and energy and agriculture, but they also represent a sector-general class of managers and investors. This managerial and investing class will continue to make a killing pursuing the off-shoring policies it has been getting for several decades now. Instead of off-shoring, it can also bring the cheap foreign labor here through immigration.

In addition to making managers and investors in general happy, the GOP program of open borders and free trade will also make one of its major elite factions happy -- agriculture. These mega-farms are highly profitable not only because of heavy subsidies from the government, but also because they hire cheap foreigners to toil in the corn fields, dairy pastures, and meatpacking plants.

The free trade agreements have all served to remove manufacturing from the US and give it to the other cheap countries, while improving agricultural exports from the US and wiping out the farms of the newly industrialized cheap countries. "Trade" is not general, it is specifically taking the form of American food traded for manufactured products from the cheap countries (clothing, cars, electronics, etc.). That's why Trump always used to complain that while Asia sends us cars by the shipload, "all we send them is beef".

From the GOP's perspective, car companies and auto workers unions do not contribute to the Republican coffers or political capital within Washington, while the mega-farms of agribusiness do, so why would Republican leaders try to make Detroit happy instead of Omaha? Especially when these large-scale farms and ranches all lie within the Great Plains, where the reddest of red states are found, while manufacturing plants are in purple states at best, and deep blue states at worst.

The Republican party's grand vision is to reverse the Industrial Revolution and have a nation's residents toiling in the fields, or performing menial servant labor waiting on people with money. They want us to go back to the feudal ages, where the GOP will enjoy the support of the landed aristocracy.

Therefore, it makes perfect sense that they would want to import hordes of field-toilers and servant-peasants from parts of the world that never launched their own Industrial Revolution. Especially when there is no electoral downside. Any self-preservation argument to the GOP leadership is doomed to failure, because they know better than you do what is good for their own preservation. They will only chuckle at your naivete.

* * * * *

On the other hand, large-scale immigration is a disaster to the Democrat party, whether they know it or not.

Sure, you could say as I just did about the GOP, "They would know better than you what is in their own interests as a party," but then the Democrats just got wiped out in a historic upset, losing many states that were solid blue for decades -- Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, a district in Maine, and essentially Minnesota (spoiled only by a third-party conservative).

So far, zero states have flipped from red to blue due to demographic replacement by immigrants. Rather, it has been white liberal yuppie carpetbaggers who have recently flipped red states blue. They are a far larger population size, they are all eligible to vote, and they turn out at high rates.

But now we've seen six medium-sized states defect en masse from the blue column, showing that it is the Democrats who are truly out of touch with what preserves their party. Not immigrants, but the (white) working class in the Industrial Midwest, who have much higher labor union membership rates than others around the country. Like yuppies, union members are already eligible to vote, are organized politically, and turn out at high rates. If you lose enough union rank-and-file support, kiss the Midwest goodbye.

There are about 15 million union members today, equal to estimates of the illegal immigrant population. Which group is more important to keep, if their interests are opposed and will not come as a combined bloc?

Back to the GSS statistics: for eligible voters, 81% voted among people who are union members or are married to one, vs. 67% among non-union households. And they are not clustered in deep blue or deep red states. Compared to non-union voters, union-linked voters were more likely to come from blue safe-havens like the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific regions, but also from the East North Central region (OH, MI, IN, IL, WI), and presumably the Great Lakes by extension.

Only Illinois is a deep blue state, and Indiana a deep red state. Ohio is usually a swing state, and although Michigan and Wisconsin voted reliably blue, it was not by a large margin -- enough for Trump to steal them away by appealing to Rust Belt working class whites.

As an inverse of the GOP, the Democrat party does not rely on the generalized corporate managerial and investing class, although it does have the backing of specific factions like Wall Street and Silicon Valley. It also relies on labor unions, and enough of them are still industrial unions rather than public sector service unions -- at least in the key Rust Belt states, rather than safe states like California.

Once those manufacturing plants are destroyed through off-shoring, the new workers in the cheap countries will not be joining unions, let alone voting in American elections for the pro-union party. So there goes millions of reliable Democrat voters. Even if the plants are kept in America, but operated by cheap foreign labor, the immigrant workers will not be unionized, and again -- bye-bye millions of reliable Democrat voters, in crucial states no less.

It is out of self-preservation that the Democrats have opposed the free trade deals for decades. Enough of them are neoliberals who vote with the majority of Republicans to push them through, and only neoliberals are allowed to become Democrat Presidents. But the majority of Congressional Democrats in both houses have opposed them, from NAFTA to permanent normal trade relations with China to CAFTA to South Korea to Trade Promotion Authority for negotiating the TPP.

Yep, the Republicans are so rotten that they make us find a few good things about the voting records of some of the most horrendous Democrats ever to serve -- Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, Harry Reid, Sherrod Brown, even Bob Menendez, voted against most or all of these anti-factory / pro-mega-farm deals.

It's not that the Democrats look after their constituents better than the GOP does. It's that the Democrats' constituents include large numbers of organized labor in high-paying sectors like manufacturing, whereas the GOP looks after the landed aristocracy in the Plains. The only sector with a large number of employees who vote reliably Republican, and whom the GOP looks after, is the military.

But that just means the GOP tries to inflate military bubbles so that more and more members of the military have "something to do somewhere around the world," rather than use them effectively for specific purposes when our national interests are clearly defined and large in magnitude. Most of that labor is not put toward truly productive use, and those guys could be creating far more value as engineers for an auto company, logistics experts for steel mills, and quality-control for tool production.

That is a large chunk of potential Democrat industry-related voters that could be stolen from the GOP if only the Democrats would more forcefully promote the re-industrialization of the economy, and demand an America-first defense policy to replace our failed and crumbling globalist empire.

* * * * *

It turns out that the Democrats have more to lose in the short and medium term from amnestying the millions of illegals, opening the borders, and off-shoring our manufacturing. That's why the GOP has always been the main vehicle for the cheap labor lobby. If the Democrats don't reverse course on immigration, they will lose the Rust Belt forever.

They are pursuing amnesty and open borders out of identity politics and multiculturalism, which is a crazy parasitic growth destroying their party. They are not doing it out of rational electoral calculations, let alone being part of the cheap labor lobby -- or else they would have signed onto all of those free trade deals.

On the one hand, it makes it more likely to get through to them since there is a rational basis for them to give up amnesty, vs. little rational basis for Republican leaders to give it up. On the other hand, if the party is emotionally hijacked by identity politics warriors, they may not be able to respond rationally. It's all still up in the air at this point, although the number of progressives coming out with "yeah but" arguments about immigration (Thomas Frank, Peter Beinart) is a welcome sign.

The Trump movement has already burned down the Republican party, which refused to serve the people. Now that Trump is beginning to cut deals with "Chuck and Nancy" rather than Ryan and McConnell, maybe the next phase of the movement will be rehabilitating the Democrat party. "Factories over foreigners" and "Medicare for all except those who must go back" -- that's how they win back the Midwest.

September 6, 2017

A bipartisan Swamp team is trying to send a bill to Trump's desk that only condemns hate and violence when it comes from the Right. They're still trying to win the game of getting him to disavow only one side, and protect the far more violent other side.

Trump should preemptively threaten to veto this bill unless it is amended to condemn hate and violence when it comes from the Left, calling out specific groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, etc.

To give himself cover, he can cite the recent broad condemnation of Antifa by the mainstream Left, including Nancy Pelosi. The Establishment has already started to sour on its pet militia after a successful campaign to collectively blame the entire Left for Antifa violence, which has forced Democrats to disavow the paramilitary group by name.

Bonus points if he gets the bill to use the specific phrase "many sides" in its condemnation of hate and violence no matter which of the many sides it may come from.

September 1, 2017

Time for another reality check on monthly immigration data and trends, with greater importance now that the DACA program is heading toward definitive action soon.

First, remember from this earlier post that we will be able to tell which side in the immigration battle is winning based on the immigrant group who first receives collective treatment from the government.

There are 20 million illegals -- too many to deal with individually, who must be dealt with as groups. Globalists seek to amnesty and citizenize all groups of illegals, nationalists to deport all groups of illegals. But constraints make each side rank immigrant groups from highest priority to lowest priority. Because the battle is public, each side chooses its most sympathetic and winnable cases first, its least sympathetic cases last.

The two extreme groups are the DACA people, who were brought into the country illegally as children, who bear little blame for being here illegally, and serious criminals, who chose to invade the country illegally and on top of that are a public menace.

The globalist ranking is to amnesty and citizenize the DACA people first, and serious criminals last. The nationalist ranking is the opposite: deport the criminals first, and DACA people last.

Criminals are not being deported as an entire class, only here-and-there as individuals, perhaps at a higher rate than under Obama, but not collectively.

The DACA people are going to get collective treatment soon, and it is going to be amnesty and citizenship rather than deportation. Although Trump may end the DACA program per se, he will not be deporting the "Dreamers". Rather, the political process by which they are amnestied and given citizenship will shift from an over-reach executive action given by Obama (DACA), and toward a normal legislative bill by Congress and signed by the President that will be upheld by the Supreme Court.

Globalist Republicans in Congress are already crafting the legislation (see here and here). That will allow the globalists to win the first major battle on immigration (they already won the first minor battle by neutering the Muslim ban), while letting Trump save face in a loss for the nationalists by nominally "ending DACA" (while still giving them amnesty and citizenship rather than putting them in line for deportation, let alone actually deporting them).

Moving on to The Wall, the prototype stage is still delayed from summer until winter, and the globalists running DHS are still allowing half of the proposals to be non-wall solutions. Always read past the headline: "The four companies [just announced] each proposed concrete walls. DHS expects to announce contracts for four non-concrete wall prototypes next week."

Sorry, but the non-wall solutions should have been killed at the beginning. We didn't chant "Build Anything Other Than a Wall!" at the Trump rallies. The fact that they are going to make it through the finals means it is more likely than not that one of these non-wall proposals will win, given who runs DHS, although that is not fait accompli just yet.

As for legal immigration levels, the globalists controlling the State Dept have kept them as high as they were under Obama, no change from the last report to that effect. The July numbers for immigrant and non-immigrant visas are well within the range of the other months of the Trump administration. Recall that the #1 source of illegal immigration these days is people who get a non-immigrant visa (say, as a tourist) and then over-stay the time allowed, residing and working here permanently.

The monthly average for immigrant visas is now 48K vs. 49K last time; for non-immigrant visas, it is now 836K vs. 826K last time. Extrapolating to 12 months at these levels (and there are only five months left to reverse course), we can expect 572K immigrant visas and 10 million non-immigrant visas during the first year of Trump. These estimates are basically unchanged from the last report.

Both of those estimates are still above most years of Obama. For immigrant visas, only 2016 saw higher numbers; for non-immigrant visas, only 2015 and '16. The decrease from last year is marginal.

Since an earlier post on deportations, there is still no evidence that they have shifted from at-the-border turn-aways to within-the-interior removals. And the total of the two remains lower than under Obama. Sanctuary cities still face no de-funding (one-half of one percent of their budget, under the Sessions plan). Still no collective action to punish employers for hiring illegals. If anything, I've noticed that the illegals working at McDonald's and Wendy's have come back within the past several months, after a brief disappearance during the early months of the Trump administration, before the Establishment hijacking in April.

The only area where there may be improvement is refugees. They have fallen by double-digit percentages, although they are not a major category of immigration to begin with (in the thousands per month, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands that are brought in under immigrant and non-immigrant visas). I would also not be surprised if the State Dept globalists are not simply playing a shell game, and giving would-be "refugees" one of the two larger kinds of visas (immigrant or non-immigrant).

We will keep our eyes peeled for solid evidence that nationalists are winning on any front of the immigration war, but this year has been one of losses. That could change next year, with the mid-term elections heating up for globalist Republicans who find themselves vulnerable in a climate of immigration restriction.

That seems to hold for other fronts in the Trump movement's war against the Establishment -- losing year when there's no election, winning year when there are elections. After all, the Trump movement has close to zero supporters throughout the entire government, and elections are one of the few ways that the citizenry outside of DC has to collectively influence policy.

August 30, 2017

After an unusually stark display of collective violence against Trump supporters and even neutral journalists in Berkeley on Sunday, Antifa soon found themselves out of favor among their Establishment enablers.

First came a euphemism-free headline to an in-depth article from the Deep State's own newsletter, the Washington Post: "Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley".

Then on Tuesday no less a liberal Establishment mainstay than Nancy Pelosi herself issued a rebuke that also called them out by name:

Our democracy has no room for inciting violence or endangering the public, no matter the ideology of those who commit such acts. The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.

Other liberals and Democrats have begun to follow suit, including the Mayor of Berkeley who had been content to let them rampage all they wanted to, and is now saying they should be treated instead as a gang.

At last the efforts by the Trump movement to cast collective blame on the other side are starting to pay off, something I've been writing about for months. We don't isolate the problem down to the narrowest groups and individuals who are committing violence on the Left -- we just say "the violent Left," and then everyone who isn't a violent Leftist has to disavow the Antifa types, or get successfully branded as a sympathizer of Leftist group violence against first amendment exercisers.

The individualist focus and overly developed sense of fair play had led the conservative movement and Republican mainstream to only decry the extremist members of the other side. But now that we are locked in group vs. group struggle, the only option is to blame the entire other side, and let them clear their own good names by disavowing and shutting down the extremists on their side.

As I wrote in an earlier post, collective blame prevents the rise of an extremist minority, by causing the mainstream of the other side to impose costs on their side's super-intolerant minority.

After Charlottesville, I floated the plan that Trump should invite a high-profile Democrat to a joint press event, where each side would disavow and call for an end to violence in general, but would specifically call out the extremists on their own side. If the Democrats refused, it would prove they are enabling Leftist collective violence. If they agreed, it would shut down their attempt to frame only the Right as a source of collective violence (both sides, many sides, etc.).

Now that Pelosi has come forward, she would make a natural choice for Trump's partner in that press event. It's hard to tell in such polarized partisan times, but it just might humanize each one -- at least a little bit -- to the supporters of the other. Each one would enjoy a little brand rehabilitation.

The sudden souring on Antifa by elite Democrats means that the Establishment is beginning to tire of using these useful idiots as a covert arm of the police state to attack political enemies of the Establishment. That's why elite Republicans don't denounce Antifa -- they too hate Trump supporters, and are fine with deranged Leftists being used to punish Trump supporters for holding the wrong values and making the wrong decisions.

I picked up on this dynamic back in April, around the time I read more and more so-called revolutionary Leftists cheering on regime change in Syria (and later, Venezuela). I'm convinced that after decades of infiltration by federal agencies, groups like Antifa and the International Socialist Organization are effectively being run for Deep State goals.

In recent comments, I summarized the evidence showing that Antifa is not some far-Left version of the Bernie movement. The actual progressives, socialists, etc., who formed the hardcore of the Bernie movement spend as much time, and often more, attacking the centrists and corporate Democrats on their own side, in the same way that the hardcore Trump movement trains most of its fire on the Paul Ryan and John McCain types on its own side.

Yet Antifa never beats up Hillary Clinton supporters, or formed a gauntlet outside of an Obama rally. They didn't even bother trying to shut down the Democrats' National Convention last summer, unlike the crowds of angry Bernie people both inside and outside the venue.

With so much impossible-to-spin negative coverage last weekend, Antifa may have worn out their usefulness to the Deep State as a counter-revolutionary paramilitary group meant to stop the populist-nationalist uprising. No different from the failed jihadist militias in southern Syria, who were serving as proxy armies for the CIA until Trump stopped it. But by that time, they had worn out their usefulness anyway, so the CIA did not bother fighting the decision.

But unlike the jihadists in Syria, who have little means to strike back at the CIA that has abruptly abandoned them, the psychotic freaks who make up the Antifa foot soldier ranks may start to wake up to the fact that they were just being manipulated by the Establishment and police state. Maybe they'll resent getting disavowed by the Mayor of Berkeley and by one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress, who hails from the Bay Area.

However, it's unclear how well these guys can organize themselves without the backing, financial and otherwise, of high-placed Democrat operatives like those who were exposed by Project Veritas' undercover videos last year. So while particular Antifa freaks may lash out violently at a Democrat, I doubt we'll see mass riots where hundreds or thousands are present, since their Soros checks may be drying up, and their political and media enablers are cutting them off as well.

August 28, 2017

Exploring the topic of the Deep State waiting longer to neuter or remove anti-Establishment figures from Trump's administration who pose less of a threat due to having less political capital (Bannon, Gorka), vs. moving quickly against major threats who have lots of political capital with which to wage war against the Establishment (Flynn, Sessions), what does this framework suggest about how the Deep State is treating Trump himself?

He could not be more anti-Establishment, but how much political capital does he have to truly pose a threat? Within DC proper, he has less than zero political capital -- in the minds of Swamp members high and low, he owes them a political debt for burning down both parties' Establishments during the campaign. He is a new-comer to politics, so he has no connections, favors, blackmail material, etc.

On the other hand, he does have a form of political capital outside of DC -- the support of tens of millions of citizens who voted for him. So far, he has not applied that leverage to the enemies in DC, although now that he's targeting Jeff Flake for primarying, that could change and he could begin to regularly call on his citizen's army to take collective action in other ways against the Swamp.

This ambiguous status of Trump's political capital -- negative within DC, potentially high but largely unused among the people -- has led to an ambivalent treatment by the Establishment. Obviously he has been targeted by Deep State ever since taking office (indeed, earlier). And yet the Generals and other elite factions have not definitively pounced on him, although they are eroding what little power he came into office with.

You might say that his high rank is protecting him, but once Nixon pulled out of Vietnam and pursued detente with the Soviets -- a big no-no during the Cold War -- the CIA caused the Watergate burglary and drove him out of office. But Nixon had lots of political capital, having been a lifelong politician, former two-term VP, and gaining more during his first term as president. That's what made his anti-hawk goals so dangerous -- he had enough political capital to actually deliver on them.

With Trump, who has no such power to pull out of Afghanistan, or to "get along with Russia," the Deep State may be deciding to put him mostly on the back burner, and temporarily move him to the front burner whenever it looks like he might use his leverage by rallying his supporters into what could become collective action against the Swamp.

As long as the Establishment views Trump more as a court jester than a king, they'll tolerate him staying as a symbolic-only anti-Establishment figure. The more they view him as someone amassing an army of followers, the quicker they will move to eject him from the court.

This is likely leading to false confidence among Trump supporters -- "Well, he's lasted this long, hasn't he?" Yes, but he hasn't really stood up to the Establishment on foreign policy, immigration, surveillance, and other big topics they hold dear (they don't care about social-cultural things like Planned Parenthood, tranny bathrooms, etc.). If he did make a major move against the Establishment on those topics, they would probably respond very quickly like they did with Flynn and Sessions.

If they did move against Trump, and if they were successful at it, it would happen fast rather than as the outcome of a long drawn-out war of attrition, since Trump has little political capital to save himself against the entire Swamp.

The longer war that this would provoke would instead be between the Establishment and the citizenry, but Trump himself could very quickly be driven out of office if he took a major move against the Establishment without first amassing an army of citizens to have his back, in the form of willingness to take some kind of collective action to defend him, not just "supporting" him ideologically.

We saw how fast the Mueller coup sprang into action after Trump fired Comey, not just because Comey was a made man within the Swamp, but because Trump had not used the only leverage he has (citizen support) in that decision. Maybe hold a rally where he savages Comey's record, then asks the crowd for thumbs up or thumbs down. They all say thumbs down. Then Trump says we should all show up to the FBI headquarters to firmly but legally ask for Comey to resign. Comey refuses, or maybe he shows weakness and leaves on his own. If not, Trump says "you're fired!" as the leader of a citizen's army, not as an isolated individual.

Or maybe put up a poll on his Twitter account, asking whether Comey should be fired (results not necessarily binding, "just curious").

Or maybe organize a national referendum on a major topic that would attract large bipartisan support among voters, including Democrats who supported Bernie and Independents. "Should the United States leave NAFTA?" Or, "Should the US admit closer to 1 million legal immigrants per year, or closer to 100,000?" Or, "What percent of healthcare costs should government pay for -- 0, 25, 50, 75, 100?"

Or something else, as long as it rallies the troops in some collective way as a display of strength before an audience of the Establishment. Otherwise he'll be charging into battle with nobody on his side.

The danger is that he'll think he can just go into these fights as one Big Man against other Big Men. But being a Big Man is socially constructed -- only if the other Big Men agree and treat you like one, are you too a Big Man. And almost none of the big players in DC view Trump as a legitimate politician, let alone the highest level of politician, or as a true policymaker whose views must be translated into action.

In private business, he was a Big Man because of all the wealth and business connections he had amassed. Those assets do not carry over into the political world, where it is political connections and political accomplishments (on behalf of one's paymasters) that determine a figure's status ranking. As far as DC writ large is concerned, Trump is still just "that guy from the Apprentice," a mogul from a sector that does not control the government (real estate), colorful commentator on Fox News, and Twitter troll.

They will only stop blowing him off and stop outright sabotaging him when they are reminded of how he got into the White House -- that he's not just some reality TV star, but the person who tens of millions of Americans voted for, in states that only he could win for the GOP, and including 14 million in the Republican primary alone. The Establishment needs a visceral reminder of who they're messing with when they mess with Trump.

In one sense, Trump is our protector, but in another sense, we are his.

August 26, 2017

Now that Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka have been removed by the Pentagon boarding party, the basis for someone getting taken out is clear: those who were a greater threat were removed first, and lesser and lesser threats have been removed afterward.

A person's threat to Deep State is a function of two factors:

1) How anti-Establishment their positions are, and

2) How much political capital they have to achieve those goals.

The first to get railroaded was Michael Flynn, spending less than a month as National Security Advisor. He is against the Pentagon Establishment's mission to prolong the long-gone Cold War, antagonize Russia, prop up and expand NATO, and partner with jihadists. He wants to shift focus to radical Islam, antagonize jihad-enabling states (only mistake being the inclusion of Iran here), and form alliances against those threats.

His political capital comes from being a three-star General from the Army and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which gave him a decent amount of connections, favors owed from allies, blackmail material against enemies, etc., among members of one of the main elite power groups that control the government (the military).

Next in line was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was forced into recusing himself from the Russia hysteria witch hunt just over two weeks after Flynn was fired.

From his lack of results above and beyond what any generic Republican AG appointed by any generic Republican President would have done, we can infer that Sessions has also been bullied into not prosecuting the high-ranking criminals from the Clinton and Obama camps, not working in tandem with DHS to deport illegal immigrants faster than Obama did, not defunding sanctuary cities (who will only lose one-half of one percent of their federal funding), and in general not advancing a distinctly Trumpian agenda at the DoJ.

That submission to the Establishment is tantamount to a firing.

Deep down, though, he is vehemently opposed to the Establishment's approach to law enforcement relating to immigration, as well as on trade policies, although as AG he is not in a position to affect trade. Being such a strong nationalist on immigration put him in the crosshairs.

Sessions spent 20 years in the highest legislative body in the nation, and was on good terms with most of Congress, so he had plenty of political capital to achieve his goals.

Those two were the big guns that Trump brought into his cabinet, and they were removed or de-fanged first. Others who are on a similar anti-Establishment wavelength have lasted longer only because they did not have nearly as much political capital to pose as large of a threat. The Pentagon junta, primarily General McMaster, has removed several of the Flynn people over the past several months, who may have had previous experience in government and the military, but who were not Generals or directors of major agencies.

Bannon and Gorka were put on the back burner of the purge since their roles were not so central to running a given place within the government, and were more of a general strategist and adviser to the President. Hailing from the conservative media world, they came to DC with even less political capital than the Flynn hires who were purged from the national security apparatus. If they were a CEO at one of the five mega-corporations that control the media, like Fox, they would have posed more of a threat and would have been targeted for removal earlier.

Presumably Stephen Miller is next, at this rate before Thanksgiving. He is anti-Establishment on foreign policy, immigration, and trade. But like Bannon and Gorka, he came to DC with little capital, having been a senior staffer for Jeff Sessions in the Senate. And we see what happened to Sessions himself. He's also the youngest, and therefore with the least experience in any domain of power.

Who, then, is relatively safer from getting removed? Anyone who is pro-Establishment, regardless of their amount of political capital. This confuses many people, though, because they assume that just because Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump coasted through longer than Mike Flynn or Steve Bannon, that means they wield as much influence within the government as Chief Economic Advisor and long-time CEO of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, who is also still in the White House.

I've discussed this since April, when the faux beef between Bannon and Kushner was being hyped in the media, and being swallowed by many Trump supporters (in reality, they were in a tactical alliance against the war-mongers, as the Pentagon over-ruled Trump on regime change in Syria). Kushner not only has no experience in government or the military, he doesn't even rank highly in the area he hails from (his father does). And at any rate, "real estate developers" is not a major power group controlling the government, or else Trump would not have had to run for President overtly.

Ditto for Ivanka's lack of power and influence. Even combined as a couple, they have zero political capital. On top of that, though, they are generally pro-Establishment, albeit on the Democrats' side -- that's why Kushner was willing to align with Bannon against the Pentagon's escalation in the Middle East. The Democrats are controlled by Wall Street, Republicans by the Pentagon. So Kushner as a Democrat wants the financial elites, rather than the military elites, to be the faction that sucks the most out of the national treasury.

Gary Cohn, on the other hand, was the second-highest executive at Goldman Sachs for 10 years before invading the White House. Unlike real estate developers, those who control financial transactions are most definitely an elite power group controlling the government, and GS is the big bank on Wall Street. He wields as much power and influence as a three or four-star General from the armed forces. And more importantly, he is the embodiment of Establishment goals -- the only way he's leaving the White House is voluntarily, not as a result of Deep State machinations.

So Trump supporters should focus their attention on Globalist Gary, and not on Trump's daughter and son-in-law, as Democrat and pro-Establishment as they may be, because one has major power and the other has none. Trump fans should learn from the Establishment's methods and pick on those who pose the greatest danger first, and put lesser entities on the back burner.

They should also keep some perspective by emphasizing what a great loss it was when Flynn got railroaded and when Sessions got bullied into submission. Bannon, Gorka, and Miller leaving are losses of smaller magnitude. That doesn't mean things are about to get a lot better, just that the major losses to the Trump movement were sustained early. For several months now, it has largely but not wholly become an Establishment administration with Trump serving as the salesman.

Improvements can always come in the future, but we do have to admit to a paradox facing the populist and nationalist movement -- the more we promote and vote for people with a good deal of political capital, i.e. the ones who can actually get things done, the more likely they are to get sidelined in one way or another by the Swamp, whereas the Deep State will tolerate symbolic but powerless figures.

I think the solution is to make collective action by the citizens central, so that the Swamp cannot just target the next Mike Flynn for instant removal without fearing a rebellion across half the country. The collective behavior of the general public is the only thing that the Deep State and DC Swamp cannot control.

We have the numbers, and we individually have the zeal, but not necessarily yet the group cohesion to pose a collective threat to those in the Pentagon, Wall Street, etc., who would target our representatives in government.

August 24, 2017

Trump delivered another rousing campaign-style rally, where fans both in the stadium and in their homes all over the country were chanting along and pumping their fists as he touched on the major themes of the populist and nationalist movement -- getting out of NAFTA, building The Wall, draining the Swamp, and on and on.

But what happens the day after the rally, or the week after? I asked this question in an earlier post last month when he held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio.

During the campaign, there was an action that all Trump supporters could take as a collective, and make their force felt by the Establishment -- "Get out there and VOTE!" Each of those collective actions at the ballot box delivered blow after blow to the GOP Establishment during the primaries, and finally to the Democrat Establishment on the day of the general election.

Now there are no more elections. The federal government isn't going to hold "special issue" elections every couple of weeks when a big topic like healthcare comes up, or even an election to determine what topic will be tackled next -- should they go after healthcare first, or immigration, or infrastructure, or something else (please specify)?

Without monthly plebiscites as a way for the people to participate, there needs to some other kind of collective action to take. Just because a large number of individuals wants policy X, or does not want policy Y, doesn't mean it will happen. Even if the government were mind-readers or had good opinion poll data, they don't have to do anything we tell them to, if they have a way of avoiding negative consequences from us.

This means it's irrelevant if Trump still has strong support -- the Swamp does not recognize "popular support" per se as a legitimate form of political capital, unless that support could make their lives painful.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but it's what we need to start brainstorming, discussing, planning, and carrying out -- while excluding the gay embarrassment of the Alt-Right who destroyed their attempt at collective action. I'm talking about things that the attendees of any given Trump rally, 99% of whom are normies, can go do the next day or the next week.

Why is this so important in the Trump era, unlike Democrat voters under Obama or Republican voters under Bush? Because Trump's own party is opposed to his agenda and refuses to cooperate with him. As far as they're concerned, Trump came to Washington not with political capital but with political debt for having burned down their worthless do-nothing sell-out party.

That means Trump is unusually constrained in what he can accomplish single-handedly, even though he won a presidential election, and no matter how much he says the right words to his base. Bush, Obama, and every other President was not just an election winner, but part of a broader network of politicians and other movers and shakers who help each other out. Not only was Trump not a part of such a network, he campaigned proudly on that fact and argued for how great it would be if those networks disintegrated.

Unfortunately, that means that no one in DC will return his phone calls, carry out his instructions, or in general seek to implement the vision that Trump ran on and won with. It is easier for organized hostile factions to gang up on him and pressure him into doing the opposite of what he campaigned on (e.g. the junta from the Pentagon twisting his arm on war policy).

Still, it's not the end of the conflict since Trump does have a form of capital or leverage that no one else in DC does -- he has us, the tens of millions of citizens who voted for him. We are his only leverage.

If we were properly aware of who to vote for, and motivated to turn out again, we could eject all of the elitists and globalists from the government, and put populists and nationalists in their place. Suddenly Congress would treat Trump fairly and act more enthusiastically to carry out his agenda. Suddenly, Trump would not be so under siege within the Executive branch.

Trump represents none of the oligarchic power groups that jockey for control over the government -- not the Pentagon, not Wall Street, not big farms, not healthcare providers, not the media, and not the schools. They all have their own distinct forms of leverage in the struggle for power, stemming from the control they have over whatever domain they're from -- control over the military, over financial transactions, over food production and delivery, over health treatments, over the flow of information, and over enculturation of the next generation.

He is instead a man of the people, and his bargaining chip against those other hostile power groups is his ability to influence the collective behavior and action of millions, and even tens of millions, of ordinary citizens.

The oligarchic groups all desperately want the general public to butt out of politics, and Trump has a unique and distinct ability to turn the public loose on the political battlefield, and the oligarchs have no way to immediately shove the public back off. So that's quite a bit of leverage, if applied.

Maybe that means motivating them to turn out at the polling stations to determine the winner of an election, and maybe it means motivating them to turn out to the Mall in DC, where millions of citizens assemble to order the Pentagon to get the hell out of Afghanistan (and other places).

What is the RNC or the DNC going to do to counter-act our collective action at the ballot box -- rig tens of millions of votes? And what is the Pentagon going to do to counter-act a massive assembly demanding an end to our failed and wasteful foreign policies -- open fire on millions of normal citizens? I don't think so. They won't be able to ignore that level of escalation from the people, and will have to fold lest it get worse.

I'm not sure that Trump understands these power dynamics, although he must be getting pretty close to the same conclusion by now. He thought they would honor the electoral outcome and treat him like they would any other President -- but he's learning just how little they're doing for him and his voters, and how much they're outright sabotaging those goals.

But so far his response has been to try to shame them on Twitter, which does not work. Unless the tweet motivates his supporters to act collectively in a way that hurts the target of the shaming, the target will just blow Trump off. Again, he seems to be thinking that they either fear or respect him just because he won the election to the highest office, so that an admonishment from the election-winner will cause the target to change their behavior. There could also be a mindset carrying over from his long career as the dictator of the Trump Organization.

But left by himself, Trump has very little power to inflict damage on the enemy groups or individuals -- he needs his supporters to act as a force multiplier.

I'm also not sure that organizing from the grassroots level will do too much in the short term, since Trump supporters have been conditioned for the past two years to act collectively on orders from the man himself -- "Get out there and VOTE!" It is Trump who needs to rally his troops into battle, not the troops who need to organize themselves.

Over the medium term, though, grassroots organizing will prove more helpful -- especially if ordinary Trump supporters become aware of how little Trump can get done by himself, with every group in DC being so opposed to his agenda. It will feel like they have captured our leader, and we need to storm the gates to set him free so he can lead us again.

This view shows who among Trump supporters will be involved in that effort -- not the ones who assume that the Trump agenda is being accomplished, perhaps secretly, just because Trump won the election and therefore has enough power to do what he promised. And certainly it won't come from people who would be "rallying" all of 500 people across the entire nation -- no force multiplier there.

Maybe for the time being, something as milquetoast as signing petitions would be enough to get the ball rolling. "Recognize Antifa as a domestic terrorist group" has gotten into the hundreds of thousands of signatures so far, and Trump called them out by name at the rally this week. Once the petitions hit those numbers, it will be impossible for the information gatekeeper General Kelly to hide what the President's supporters are all riled up about.

Next up -- a write-in campaign or petition to the RNC demanding that Paul Ryan be removed as Speaker and some specific Trump supporter be put in his place?

August 22, 2017

After the Pentagon brass formally hijacked our foreign policy in April when they coerced the Trump administration into pursuing regime change in Syria, and then intensifying our commitment to the largest exporter of jihadism when they gave hundreds of billions worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the announcement last night of a troop surge in Afghanistan comes as no surprise.

Now that the Pentagon party is back in power, it is the military elites who will raid the treasury to inflate a bubble, after eight years of the Wall Street party inflating a bubble for the financial elites.

What did shock most people, though, was the total lack of commitment to any clearly defined objectives for winning -- or rather, any clearly defined criteria for declaring that Uncle Sam has officially "gone bust" in Afghanistan and is getting the hell out.

So far, even though they hate our guts, the militaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan have not attacked American soil, nor have terrorist groups from either country -- how many American civilians are an acceptable number killed if the war escalates to that level? A hundred civilians? A thousand civilians? Another September 11th?

Over 2000 American soldiers have already died there -- will 5000 dead be enough? Or 10,000 dead?

Over 1 to 2 TRILLION dollars have already been wasted there -- will 5 trillion dollars be enough? Or 10 trillion dollars?

Over 16 years have already been squandered there -- will 30 years be enough? Or 100 years?

Last night the Pentagon signaled that it is willing to send every last soldier into the meat grinder, waste every last dollar that the government has or that it can borrow, and spend every last year of our country's existence occupying Afghanistan. Anything less would be "taking options off the table".

The refusal to level with the war-weary American people will not be matched in communications with our allies. Certainly the other NATO leaders will know how many troops we're sending, how much weaponry, how many vehicles, and roughly how much that all costs.

More importantly, the various warring factions within Afghanistan will know the facts -- they're right there on the ground, you think they're not going to be able to tell whether an additional 4000 vs. 40,000 troops have started climbing up their mountains? Or whether an additional $10 billion vs. $100 billion worth of equipment has started driving down their roads?

The Afghan forces will have the keenest awareness of how much the American presence will have grown by, and how it is being used. They don't need to tune in to CNN to figure that out.

So the only people who will be in the dark are the American people, and the Pentagon preemptively dressed them down for even thinking about asking for a commitment not to go beyond certain limits for troops deployed, dollars spent, and years gone by.

This is no different from the Wall Street behavior and attitude when it was their party in power under Obama. There was no limit to how low interest rates would go, nor how long they would be kept that low, nor how many trillions of dollars the Fed would burden its balance sheet with in order to bail out the financial elites. Anyone asking those questions was told to shut up and just go along with the bailouts, or else there would be apocalyptic consequences for the economy.

Now we're told that if we don't bail out the Pentagon, arms dealers, and defense contractors forever and ever, our national security will collapse. Same BS, different vendor.

Our ruling class has escalated beyond callousness toward its subjects, to outright hostility against them. The elites are not only going to continue sucking as much blood as possible out of America's body, they have now opened fire on anyone who tries to pull the parasite away from its half-dead host.

Doubling down on their part will only cause doubling down on the people's part -- next time it won't be a magnanimous deal-maker who the voters send to negotiate with the Swamp. It will be a remorseless Terminator, leading a larger army of single-minded machines. The mere specter of revolution is the only thing that has ever caused a parasitic elite class to change its ways and begin running society for the good of the people.

But since Trump is only the initial good cop, expect the civil war / revolution atmosphere to get worse over the short term.

August 21, 2017

An article in the LA Times reviews the data on immigration enforcement so far during the Trump administration, pointing to the same conclusion I and others have reached for months now -- that the picture is largely unchanged from the Obama era, other than illegal border crossings being down.

Even there, they have risen for the past three straight months, likely showing that the initial drop was due to would-be immigrants believing that they would not be able to live and work illegally in the new era of Trump, therefore not bothering to try crossing the border.

Now that it is becoming clear that there's no wall in sight, that deportations are lower than under Obama, that Obama's catch-and-release program is still de facto policy, that DACA is still in effect, and that the courts tie up any attempt to control the flow of foreigners, the immigrants' perception has shifted toward a more cautious willingness to start crossing the border illegally all over again.

The longer the lack of strong immigration action persists, the more convinced the immigrants will become of the weakness of the American border, and they will keep crossing more and more until they're back at Obama-era levels again.

As for deportations falling, the LA Times quotes an ICE spokeswoman who assures us without any numbers that there has merely been a shift in the type of deportation -- from the meaningless definition of turning people back right at the border, to removing people who have actually settled somewhere in the interior of the country.

The lack of numbers is telling because every other claim is backed up by statistics, whether released to the public or to the investigative reporter by request. Trump, his team, and his rationalizers in the media and the general public can quote how much illegal border crossings have fallen, down to the percentage point.

If there has really been a surge in true deportations, and a decline only in the fake deportations, everyone would be touting it -- whether they were in favor, saying look at the good job we're doing, or whether they were opposed, saying look how awful the situation is under Trump.

We'll see these stats anyway in the year-end report, so the total lack of specificity suggests they're trying to hide something in the meantime.

Even assuming that one type of removal has replaced another one-for-one, that still implies that the total investment in deporting illegals has not changed from Obama. The argument assumes that the amount of time, money, and manpower is exactly the same as it was under Obama, only being allocated to the interior rather than the border.

Yet we expect a greater investment under Trump, not the same old amount. Why don't we have twice the money and twice the manpower devoted to this problem now, allowing not just a substitution of one kind of enforcement for another, but an increase over that to boot?

As usual, Trump himself is not to blame -- he's certainly not the one ordering the investment to remain unchanged. But also as usual, Trump is not omnipotent -- close to the opposite, in fact, when it comes to immigration, since almost nobody in the government feels compelled to carry out his instructions on this issue, whether cabinet secretaries or lowly officers.

Quiet mutiny is the order of the day on immigration, as the outsider President has minimal political capital (perhaps even political debt) with which to inflict consequences on those who betray the policies he ran and won on.

We've seen General Kelly, as head of DHS, betray the immigration program by hiring Kevin McAleenan to lead US Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol. McAleenan is an open-borders Obama holdover who had been deputy at CBP, now promoted to the top by General Kelly.

But now I'm starting to wonder how much of the sabotage and subversion is due to the Border Patrol agents being majority Hispanic -- estimates are just over 50%, from the end of George W. Bush onward. I couldn't find stats on how much of the ICE agents are Hispanic.

Naturally, Hispanic agents are going to sympathize more with Hispanic border-crossers than Anglo agents would, especially if the Hispanic agents are not deeply rooted in this country. Ditto for deporting illegals within the interior who have already started to live and work here, perhaps with families here. If a majority of Border Patrol agents are Hispanic, that might explain why catch-and-release is still the norm.

VDare wondered the same thing in February when there were only initial reports of some agents not wanting to carry out Trump's orders. Most of us don't know that these BP agents are mostly Hispanic. I figured if they were federal agents, they were recruited around the nation and then assigned to the border. But it looks like they're recruited locally, where the population is much more Hispanic than the nation as a whole.

The LA Times article points to another series of problems that comes from the BP agents being mostly Hispanic, although they don't mention that this is because the applicant pool is so Hispanic. Namely, that such a large fraction of the applicants fail for really bad reasons -- not passing the drug test, having engaged in human trafficking, having dealt drugs, not passing a lie detector test, and so on. Anglos would pass these background checks at far higher rates.

VDare also discussed the criminal consequences of having such a Hispanic BP force -- soaring corruption, sometimes with agents who may not even be American citizens working on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.

One solution to this problem, without making it explicitly racial or ethnic, would be to begin recruiting drives from the Rust Belt states that flipped for Trump. They have among the lowest rates of immigrant residents. It could be framed as helping out the economically left-behind workers of the Rust Belt, giving them something patriotic to do for decent pay until the factories start coming back. I favor Western Pennsylvania -- Appalachians are territorial, and would be natural border agents.

A second solution would be to re-assign deployed members of the armed forces -- Americans ought to protect America instead of Afghanistan. If there are fewer BP agents under Trump than under Obama, and if the goal of adding 5000 seems out of reach, then just cut the number who are in Germany by 5000. They will pass the background checks more or less with no problems, and they won't need very much additional training. It would also boost their morale, giving them something clearly productive to do to defend their country, rather than ask why the fuck we're still in Afghanistan.

Other better solutions may be out there, too -- but they certainly will not come from the cheerleader squad who just chant "never sick of winning" no matter what the numbers continue to show. While that cuts out a fair share of hardcore Trump supporters, it does not include the immigration single-issue people like Mark Krikorian, Ann Coulter, CIS, and immigration beat reporters at conservative media outlets like Breitbart and Lifezette, or frankly the LA Times.

I've seen no sign that they're going to rationalize whatever the data say just because a hardliner won the election -- there are so many sources of subversion throughout the government and the private sector employer base, and Trump is not a literal God-Emperor who knows all of the facts (especially with General Kelly restricting what info the President receives), and who has the power to implement his wishes with the snap of a finger.

Now it is our job to help turn up the heat on those subversives on behalf of our only-human President.

August 15, 2017

Now that's the Trump from the campaign trail, unshackled from his Pentagon boarding party handlers! Suck on this, General Kelly:

From a press conference about infrastructure, the questions from the press went immediately to Charlottesville, trying to pin him further against the wall. But here in an impromptu setting, his natural instincts came out and he called out the Violent Left in addition to dissing the White Nationalists, as well as lambasting the media for only portraying one side as violent.

He also did a good job of de-contaminating whatever normies were in attendance at the rally, who just wanted to protest the removal of a Confederate statue rather than throw up Nazi salutes, saying they were not violent, and pivoting to ask whether the statue-removers will target George Washington and Thomas Jefferson next, since they were slaveholders too.

Great comeback, making the media and Establishment now stick up for the Violent Left and extremists who want to topple any historical monument on the grievance that all of American history is corrupted and stained by the legacy of slavery etc.

Larger lesson: Trump supporters need to do everything they can to remove the Pentagon boarding party from his cabinet. Easier said than done, but that must remain a top priority -- we see how he wins on his instincts, and gets led to the slaughter when the Generals pressure him into appeasing the executioners (which they do by design, to remove him from office).

August 13, 2017

The media, Deep State, and Democrat party don't care about whoever got killed and injured today in Charlottesville. They're just using the event to score political points against Trump, his supporters, and their America-first vision, by collectively blaming all of them for the act of a marginal white nationalist.

That attempt to tar & feather all Trump voters as racist Nazis blew up in their faces during the election season, because everyone knows there aren't tens of millions of Nazis in America. Saying so made the anti-Trumpers sound utterly insane to normal people, and discredited whatever else they were trying to say about Trump's vision.

By the same token, the white nationalists should learn the same lesson: they were irrelevant to Trump's victory. There aren't enough of them to make a dent at the ballot box, and they were not the ones driving the narrative and news cycle -- that was Trump himself. Nor were his amplifiers on social media a bunch of white nationalist LARPers.

The attempt at making Trump repeatedly disavow the wannabe Nazis also failed to achieve the intended goal of putting Trump on the defensive. True, he doesn't want to have to respond to every simpering fag who screams out "Do you want the support of these white nationalists?!" Still, he truly does not identify with them or like them, so he can sincerely disavow them and not "give" anything to the enemy ideologically.

Now it is time to lob the collective blame grenade back over into the enemy's territory where it came from. The other side has already made clear that they intend to target all Republicans, even if they were vocal never-Trumpers. So we have to respond in kind by casting blame at the broadest level, as in the disruption of a Trump assassination performance that blamed the entire audience for contributing to the normalization of political violence.

Applied strongly enough, collective blame can prevent the rise of a violent minority, as the other side's majority cracks down on its black sheep to avoid further blame.

Toward that end, the best way forward for Trump is to invite a high-ranking Democrat to a joint press event where each one disavows and condemns the extremist violence coming from their own side, calling out specific groups, as well as a general statement about condemning political violence "no matter who commits it, and no matter who it targets".

He could invite Obama to condemn the cop killings committed by those radicalized by Black Lives Matter, as Trump condemns the church bombing and car attack by white nationalists.

He could invite Hillary Clinton to condemn Antifa -- after which Attorney General Sessions opens an investigation into them as a domestic terrorist organization, since the FBI has already begun to investigate the Alt-Right.

He could invite Joe Biden (who claims there's "only one side" in political violence) to condemn the Alexandria shooter who targeted Congressional Republicans as a whole.

He could invite the head of CAIR to condemn the radical Islamic terror killings from just the recent past.

It would be more powerful to have two or more big Democrats, and more Republicans than just Trump (although not some spineless cuck), to make the event more of a clear bipartisan team effort to tone down the rising political violence.

It's win-win for Trump: if they accept, he forces them to concede the point that everyone already knows, about liberals and Democrats being far more prone to collective violence, he forces a public apology and denunciation, and he avoids being portrayed as the "only side" responsible for collective violence.

If they refuse, he forces them to concede their hypocrisy about caring about political violence, and that they are tolerating and even encouraging future political violence by their side, while exploiting human tragedy just to score cheap shots against someone from the other side of the aisle. He comes off as magnanimous and says how sad it is that the other side cannot bring themselves to condemn the violence coming from their own side.

Either way, they have to drop one of their major masks, and the media will have to follow suit.

If Trump is not allowed to pursue this winning strategy by the Pentagon coup members in his cabinet, then some other high-profile Republican could take his place, and invite similar-ranking Democrats. Tucker Carlson inviting Rachel Maddow, for instance -- and both broadcasting the same event during their shared primetime slot of 9pm.

We can never let the general public forget about who commits the vast bulk of collective violence in this country. And we won't have to draw a pie chart -- although both sides will be condemning extremists on their own side, the audience knows how many BLM cop killings or radical Islamic terror attacks there have been, as opposed to white nationalist murderers.

My guess is the other side would reject the bipartisan outreach effort, just as the White House press corps laughed at Mike Cernovich for asking them to condemn Antifa after a string of violent clashes throughout April, or as Virginia Governor McAuliffe just ignored a question from Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam if he condemned Antifa. Oh well, at least the media, Deep State, and Democrats will never be able again to harangue Trump and his supporters about white nationalists.

I literally went to the White House to ask the media to disavow poltical violence.